Coast Blusters : The ‘Feud’ Between Los Angeles and San Francisco Columnists Was Largely a Fraud

HERB CAEN RECENTLY wrote a Sunday column for the San Francisco Chronicle announcing that it would be his last Sunday column. He was cutting back to a mere five days a week.

He pointed out that he had always hated writing the Sunday column because it wasn’t his style: It was an essay, usually literary and nostalgic, and almost always about the wonders of San Francisco.

“The daily column is more me,” he explained. “Mister Monkey Mind, hopping along from subject to subject on a wave of three-dottiness, one-liners, puns, a wisp of fog, a sprig of news, the more-than-occasional correction, a lot of corniness about the sophistication of the great gray city, here a plug, there a knock. . . .”

Waxing nostalgic about San Francisco had worn thin as the city changed, he said. “Talking about how great Old San Francisco was exposed me as the crank and grump I was becoming.”

I take it Herb also has given up his running commentary on the horrors of Los Angeles. He has been rather amiable toward us since he came down for the Olympic Games in 1984 and found a decent place to eat.

The alleged feud between San Francisco and Los Angeles columnists was largely a fraud; I have always liked Frisco and said so, and Herb apologized for applauding a license plate that said “NUKE LA.”

That such an intercity rivalry once existed, though, is demonstrated by Page 1 of the Los Angeles Times for July 14, 1923, retrieved from our History Center by archivist Carolyn Strickler.

It proves that the feud was sponsored by The Times itself. Side-by-side columns, by Eddie Boyden of the Chronicle and Harry Carr of The Times, appeared under the dual headline, “What Los Angeles Thinks of San Francisco, What San Francisco Thinks of Los Angeles.”

They were No. 6 in a series, and by then the papers’ two ace columnists must have been written out on the subjects. Boyden concerns himself mainly with satirical comments on Hollywood males who wear golf and polo duds but never heft a golf club or a mallet and women who wear earrings like chandeliers and smear themselves with rouge.

Carr concludes amicably that both Los Angeles and San Francisco are products of “one of the mightiest and most spectacular world movements in the history of mankind. The settlement of this Coast is the last race migration of the Aryan people.”

He recalls the rise and fall of Greece and Rome and concludes, “We have completed the circle. We have gone westward until there is no more west to which to go. . . . Whatever the end may be--whatever the secrets of our destiny--it is clear that the settlement of Los Angeles and San Francisco is part of a great world story; that we are two poor little gnats making faces at one another as we are whirled on to the end.”

In his cosmic vision, Carr failed to foresee the great migrations from south and west. He saw our growth as nothing but an Aryan phenomenon. Of course, the first five columns in the series may have been more specific and vitriolic.

Years ago, the Saturday Evening Post asked Herb Caen and me to write side- by-side articles on each other’s cities. I was shocked by San Francisco’s postwar deterioration and wrote about the decline of Market Street into a pornography mall, the dismal slum of the Mission district, the pollution of the skyline by monolithic skyscrapers, the clammy beaches and the disaster of Candlestick Park.

Caen handled his assignment with his usual savoir-faire. He simply said that he came down to Los Angeles, but he couldn’t find it.

Perhaps I loved San Francisco too much to bear what had happened to it. But now that Caen is at a disadvantage, having dropped his Sunday column, I would like to declare the feud officially over.

San Francisco has largely recovered from its wartime wounds. Its skyline has absorbed its monstrosities. Its tourist industry has suffered from the earthquake, but San Francisco will come back. It remains the most romantic city in the nation.

In his withdrawal column, Caen quoted a bit of the prose he thinks is out of date: “. . .the fog slithering through the harp strings of the bridge, gobbling up Alcatraz and, like a great python, settling down under the Bay Bridge to digest a rock !”

What does he mean--out of date? The fog still slithers through the harp strings of the bridge, gobbles up Alcatraz and, like a great python, settles down to digest Candlestick Park.

If you object to my calling it Frisco, I quote from a letter Caen wrote me: “I think Frisco is a fine, salty, irreverent word, known and loved around the world. . . . I’m not sure we deserve that loving nickname any longer.”

From one gnat to another.